this morning, I got quite frustrated by a couple of things going on. first of all, no sync! second, digsby! sticky notes and digsby are two things I've come to rely on. there's some talk about a protocol change (or using old protocols or something like that) I read that pointed to digsby's msn having connection problems while using windows live mesh. while live mesh was running, msn would drop off. according to their blog, it's a known issue and will be revised in a future release.

anyway, so here I am. I decided to get rid of mesh in favor of something I've been using awhile and have come to love: dropbox. the challenge with dropbox was that I had to find a way to synchronize the content (yeah that's easy I know) without having the content only in the dropbox folder.

the first thing I thought of doing was writing a script to copy the dropbox content on sync detection. this seemed like OVERKILL when I found someone else's brilliant solution: ntfs junctions.

once you open up sticky notes again, it'll be pointing to the file in your dropbox folder courtesy of the junction you just created. :)

if you open the path to the original stick notes directory, you'll notice there's a shortcut icon on the folder to indicate it's a junction. if you open up the folder, you'll find yourself in your dropbox folder.

okay, now you're syncing sticky notes to dropbox... but what about another computer? simple. just run through the same steps above, except this time, don't worry about copying your stickynotes.snt file since it already exists in dropbox.

notes

there's one caveat I should mention. the synchronization can't take place while sticky notes is running. you'll want to close your sticky notes application every now and then so that dropbox has a chance to sync your changes.

this applies to computers receiving the files from dropbox as well. as long as sticky notes is running, it won't be able to sync the contents.